Moving towards an on-demand world

I have always been a big believer of the hosted software or ASP (application service provider) model since we made our first investment in LivePerson in January 1999. One of our main competitors of that era was Kana, which at that time, did way better than LivePerson in terms of customers, revenue, and market capitalization. I wrote a post months ago showing how far Kana had fallen, and how LivePerson stuck with its hosted software model and finally hit profitability. Back in those days, the sales people at LivePerson and Kana were not only fighting a product battle but also a religious war of enterprise licenses versus the hosted model. And back then, many large enterprise customers were not willing to have their data hosted with an early stage, private company. The world is changing. Recently Kana announced its new “on-demand” model jumping on the hosted software bandwagon. Comments from the Kana release sound familiar-Siebel and others are increasingly talking about an “on-demand” model and customer flexibility. RightNow Technologies is another company in the CRM space that is delivering an “on-demand” solution, filing for an IPO last month. So why is the hosted or ASP model coming back strong from its near death experience during the Internet boom?

First and foremost, without customers there is no business. Today’s customers are increasingly getting over data hosting concerns and are warming to the pricing and flexibility of subscription pricing and “on-demand” software. They are tired of the traditional enterprise license model, the lengthy implementation costs, paying for site licenses instead of on usage, and failed projects. Secondly, the cost side of the equation has changed dramatically. Hosted software vendors have learned from their erroneous ways and no longer need to build a data center for unlimited demand. Additionally, the pure costs of building a data center and using bandwidth have decreased significantly. Finally, the “on-demand” model is proven as a number of companies are already profitable-look at Salesforce.com, RightNow, and a couple from my portfolio, LivePerson and Expertcity (GoToMyPC).

Given these trends and the success of some of the companies above, it is clear that the new “on-demand” wave is just starting, and we will continue to see enterprise software companies like Kana move in this direction.